Darshan (38 page)

“There is nothing wrong with her,” Manmohan told his son. “You rode her too fast.”

Shutting off the engine, Darshan said, “We should go back. Junker Uncle should look at her.”

“We go to Ba.”

Darshan’s mouth tightened.

“Vasant rides with you,” Manmohan told him. “Chandan, Sabar, and I will follow.”

Both trucks set off together, cresting two more hills, and despite the slow progress, Manmohan was reassured by every inch of distance gained. They descended the last rise, the worst of the steep inclines behind them, but as he glanced with relief at the edge of the gully, Chandan shouted in alarm.

“Manmohanji!”

The tailpipe of Darshan’s truck was spluttering black fumes, and as some of the exhaust cleared in the breeze, Manmohan cried out. The vehicle was speeding away down the hill.

Ahead of them, Vasant waved frantically out of the passenger window. There was a loud creaking noise and then a pop, like an internal explosion.

“His brakes!” Sabar shouted.

There was a long screech as Darshan’s truck approached the bottom, grinding against the emergency brake. The vehicle pivoted to the right and slowed a little, skidding, the tires burning with acrid smoke until it finally stopped beyond the base of the hill, all the weight leaning to the right, the left half of the truck lifting off the ground. It hung in mid air for an eternity. Dust swirled. Then the whole vehicle finally shuddered to the ground on its tires, the engine smoking badly.

As Chandan pulled up close, Manmohan leaned into the dashboard and squinted at the smoke, catching a glimpse of his usually mild-tempered son jumping out of the cabin with a wrench in his hand. A gust of wind tossed the smoke to the far right, and he had a clear view when Darshan kicked the front tire, then swung the wrench against the side metal panel, leaving a huge dent. Manmohan clenched his fists, feeling his arthritic joints resisting.

“One of the engine valves is busted,” Darshan bellowed heatedly, wildly brandishing the wrench. “And the brakes are out.”

Chandan parked alongside the damaged vehicle, and Manmohan eased his body out of the truck. “Go find help,” he told the millworker.

Chandan nodded, put the truck in gear, and sped off.

“You should not have gone to him,” Manmohan said, his voice quiet but tense. “He is not your brother.”

Darshan stared at his father in shock.

“He has done horrible things,” Manmohan continued, steeling against the rebellion he knew was coming. “He is not a part of this family anymore. I never thought it was possible to truly break with family. There was always something that connected us, even across the ocean and all the land from here to India. I never believed it could happen. But it can. And when it does, it is not temporary, and it is not just with one of us. Mohan broke from us all.”

The rigid, angry tension in Darshan’s shoulders thawed into resignation. “It was not me, Bapu.” He nodded toward the millworkers. “I sent them both for you, but I suppose they had other ideas.” Then he pointed to the dented panel with the wrench, as though overcome, like he no longer cared, and said, “I will fix that.”

~   ~   ~

The river nearby, behind the clump of taro, was calm as Manmohan rested under the shade of a banyan tree. Jai wrapped a piece of rope into a figure eight around one of their cow’s rear ankles and set a bucket underneath the udders, then hiked up her pantaloons and sat on the milking stool. The cow snorted and shifted uncomfortably, rolling its eyes. She patted its haunch.

Darshan was away. There was an inlet in Sigatoka where he and his friends could jump off an old pier and swim in the calm waters hugged by mangroves. Manmohan looked toward the river, remembering his children splashing there, playing beyond the ferns and taro. They did not play there any longer. He imagined those young men with Darshan now, laughing and free, their nakedness and the long strides of their thin legs as they ran down the pier to plunge into the water, the Falcon parked off to the side, waiting to bring them home.

As Jai milked, Manmohan leaned his head against the tree trunk. The
Psalm of Peace
was in his back pocket, the rectangular shape of it against his bottom. He still had not read it. This morning he forced it onto one of his shelves that was already bulging with hardbacks, paperbacks, and sets of encyclopedias. He had hoped to forget about it, to lose it in the multitude of his many other books crammed onto the ceiling-high shelves. But an hour later he picked it up again, slipping it into his pocket.

Lifting his head slightly off the tree, Manmohan observed his wife, the pulsing of her grip on the udders, the forward bend of her back as she concentrated, the almost imperceptible movement of her lips as she whispered something soft and encouraging to the cow. Just beyond his wife, he could see his old broken-down World War II truck parked and abandoned off in the bushes. The growth had overtaken the now flat tires, and the metal frame was pockmarked with large jagged holes where the rust had eaten away at it. He had almost put the flatbed there with it, but at the last minute had decided to give it to Junker Singh. Although Darshan had repaired the dent, the engine had been irreparable. It was probably disassembled now, parts strewn across the mechanic’s shop floor. It would have been foolish to leave it in the clearing, to delude himself into thinking he might one day have it fixed. He knew he would not.

With some difficulty, he stood. Slipping his feet into his sandals, he approached the cow and laid a hand on its back. “Do you need anything from town?” he asked Jai.

She shook her head.

He felt around in his front pocket for the keys to his other World War II truck but changed his mind when he walked past the carport. He no longer drove much, only occasionally in the window between his doctor’s appointments, when the lingering sensation of the therapy sessions cleared out of his bones. And it was good to be on his feet, to be reminded that although he was forty-nine and not the same physically fit man he had once been, there was still some remaining strength left in his body. Leaving his cane against one of the house’s stilts, he continued on down the drive, stepping carefully over the uneven planks of wood until he stood under the rickety stand that served as one of the main road’s bus stops.

He waited a little more than a half an hour before the bus arrived, already packed with riders, the window tarps curled upward to give the people some air. He climbed aboard and pushed his way to the middle, settling onto the edge of a bench already occupied by two other men. The bus, the feel of bodies pressed against him, crowded in on the ripped vinyl seats, bouncing along the badly-paved roads, the springs digging into his bottom and his back, was a rare and welcome change from the normal. He never took the bus, and the discomfort of it grounded him; it was oddly consoling in its remoteness from all things customary.

The bus made its final stop, and Manmohan allowed the rushing stream of passengers flooding down the aisle to push him tide-like toward the front and outside. Everyone dispersed toward the city, and the bus rumbled across the street to park in the terminal, leaving him all alone to stare up at Penitentiary Hill.

He had intended to lose himself in Suva, in the small clusters of men chatting outside electronics or sundry shops on Victoria Parade, sharing news from abroad. He had thought that perhaps he might also visit Junker Singh today. But instead he gazed upward at the prison, thinking of Livleen. He saw the prison as she had once seen it. She had been a small girl, perfect and sweet and only eight. She had been told that the only thing between her and the locks on those prison doors was one word from a person she trusted would never utter it.

He began to climb, his aching knee joints carrying him up the hill, consumed by a sense of dread as he moved upward. But he had to continue, to dispel the demons.

Approaching the gray building, he touched the cool, stucco wall and paused to catch his breath. Glancing around, he was strangely disappointed. There was a small tower with cables running from it, and the windowless penitentiary building was not as massive as it had appeared from below. Far more imposing from down on the street, at the top it was unremarkable.

A slat opened in the door to Manmohan’s left. A man with a mustache addressed him through the bars. “Do you have an appointment?”

Manmohan straightened. “No.”

The guard began to close the slat, but Manmohan stopped him. “Are there many men here?”

“Some.”

“And what have they done?”

The man’s mustache rose as his upper lip curled in an expression of boredom. “Not much. Theft and the like. The bad ones are taken off the island.”

“I see.”

“That all?”

“Yes,” Manmohan said. “No, wait.” He removed the
Psalm of Peace
from his back pocket and pushed it through the bars. “Here,” he said.

The guard took a moment to glance through the book. Then he pushed it back. “There is nothing like this here.”

“Just keep it.”

“No one will read it.”

“Maybe you will like it.”

The guard shrugged. “Okay.” Without another word, he shut the slat.

Manmohan turned away from the door, the clarity he had hoped for still eluding him.

He glanced around one more time. The hill was not as high as Darshan’s coconut tree, but the view was adequate. He could see most of the city, the children’s school two kilometers east, the gurdwara and Hindu temple across from each other in the north quarter of Suva, the elaborate Colonial headquarter buildings to the south. He could see all the way out toward the docks, the tips of the ships’ masts, and the horizon beyond.

He began his descent, pausing occasionally to look around at the changing altitude of the city around him, until at last he was standing on the flat surface of the street to wait for the bus back to Veisari.

A Shack in the Jungle

1966

Family Tree

The name Ranjit Singh Toor carried with it mystery and glimmers of memory. There was the scarred skin of one missing eye, and the kind, reflecting gaze of the other in which Manmohan had always been magnificent and loved. There was also a maroon turban that had possessed within its cotton fibers the perfumes of India—the clay of the earth and the spices of curry—until one day the cloth had absorbed a new and frightening smell. Manmohan had been only three when his uncle died, and this was all he remembered of their walks through Barapind. But later, when his aunt Desa had determined him old enough to hear them, she told him stories of the mighty Ranjit.

What Manmohan had come to understand from his aunt’s accounts was that Ranjit’s world was too small in that unassuming Punjab town, in those humble villages where families had nestled for centuries. Thus he had ventured outward from the rural nucleus into which he had been born, at first because he had no other choice, but later because he needed to escape in search of something that might ground him. “We were cast out,” Desa told Manmohan when he asked what had become of his uncle. Firmly holding his chin, she had searched his eyes. “We were sent away from our land, and he, like your father, like us all, was set adrift.”

Floating in the middle of a vast ocean, the air about Manmohan pulsated with yet another coming change, another imminent journey. One pencil and three blank university applications were arranged in a row at the top of Darshan’s desk: Oxford, University of Sydney, and UC Berkeley. Manmohan gazed down at them, his fingers lightly tented over Oxford. The light was strange on the paper, cutting in through the windowpanes and leeching the color from everything.

He peered outside into the jungle in the direction of Darshan’s shack, then opened one of the desk drawers. Finding it empty, he closed it with a hollow wooden clatter. He looked around his son’s room, the bed the only other piece of furniture. Nobody lived here. Nobody had lived here for a very long time.

“I knew this would happen,” Manmohan had told Darshan’s teacher the other day, sitting in the classroom where his son had spent so much of his time.

Mr. Gupta had frowned. “You have always wanted this for your children.”

“I know he should go. I know the mind is—”

“You have always valued the mind.”

“But he will not come back.”

His tone blunt, Mr. Gupta had replied, “Beyond this island the changes occurring are monumental. The mind cannot flourish here. You will simply have to trust him.”

Lifting the corner of the Oxford application, Manmohan delicately held it up, tilting his head to examine it more closely. The promise of enterprise had brought the Toor family to Fiji, but even then he knew that one day this would not be enough. He knew that one day only an education, only books, would carry the young forward. Yet, for all his reading, for all the expectations that his children firmly grasp this truth, he had not anticipated being left behind.

“Bapu?”

Startled, Manmohan dropped the application. It slipped off the desk and onto the floor under the bed. He watched it disappear, unable to bend to get it. Darshan went down on his knees, reaching to retrieve it. He then set it back in place on his desk.

“You left these here,” Manmohan said.

Darshan nodded toward the jungle. “They will get dirty out there.”

Manmohan pulled one of the blankets from his son’s bed and wrapped it around his shoulders. “Have you decided which one?”

Darshan sat at his desk, picking up the pencil. “Not yet.”

“There is not much time left.”

“I know.”

Manmohan sank onto the mattress. “I was just thinking about your great uncle Ranjit. Our lives are very simple in comparison. The consequences are not as severe as they were for him, but still he knew what he wanted in the most difficult of circumstances. He battled a kingdom, fought for his family, went on impossible missions, lost an eye, was tortured, starved in train stations, and traveled far and wide. He sacrificed everything to protect his countrymen against the evils of racism and oppression. He was a warrior.”